Pride and Avarice

When the first wave of novelists began to tackle the post-9/11 world, many critics marveled (and some jeered) that they’d done it so soon. In 2005, Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” and Ian McEwan’s “Saturday” were in the vanguard. Since then, new works touching on our jittery times have appeared with increasing frequency. And yet, almost a decade after the cataclysm, it can still strike a reader as portentous or premature when the somber shadow of that day falls across the pages of contemporary fiction. So it’s with surprise, even incredulity, that you grasp, as you read Adam Haslett’s first novel, that this book, set chiefly in 2002, not only tucks 9/11 into its narrative in an uncowed, offhand way but, to an extent, leaves it behind. Instead, Haslett tracks a different calamity: the global economic crisis that accelerated after 2001, propelled by bad mortgages, bad financial instruments, bad regulations and bad faith. As Doug Fanning, the protagonist (in no way a hero) of “Union Atlantic,” curtly observes, recapping the trajectory that made him rich, the attacks on 9/11 “only sped the trend.” So much for the halcyon pre-9/11 mind-set. This novel’s narrative history doubles as news analysis.

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Fanning, a narcissistic bachelor, has taught himself to ride out adversity by refusing to be accountable for others. When, as a teenager in Massachusetts, he tired of his troubled mother’s heavy drinking, he joined the Navy and dropped her cold. In 1988, on a warship in the Persian Gulf, he was among those responsible for a terrible military error, shooting down a plane with 290 civilians on board. Not only did he get away with it, he was awarded a combat ribbon.

Back in America, Fanning has prospered by helping to turn a sound regional commercial bank — the Union Atlantic of the title — into a rotten global financial-­services conglomerate. He has floated hundreds of millions abroad, imperiling the investments of unwitting citizens but increasing his company’s earnings, to the great satisfaction of his boss, Jeffrey Holland. “The old compact” has changed, Fanning tells Holland, and the public’s “old assurances” that government, business and the news media will respect their interests have expired. What matters nowadays, he insists, is to “focus on the bigger picture. . . . Influence. Power over information. Control.” His advice to Holland is blunt: “You take the advantage you can get.” But if Henry Graves, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, were to find out about Union Atlantic’s shenanigans, would he expose them or hide them? And if he exposed them, would the bankers pay a personal price for their abuse of power and the public trust?

Recent headlines in the financial press could have come from the pages of Haslett’s novel. In 2008, it has now been revealed, the New York Fed, then headed by Timothy Geithner, the current United States Treasury secretary, instructed the insurance giant A.I.G. to hide information from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Like the Fed chairman in Haslett’s novel, Geithner (whose defenders have said he knew nothing of such instructions, that they were relayed by underlings) has plausible deniability. Unlike Henry Graves, Geithner isn’t fictional — and neither is his situation.

The eerie overlap of Haslett’s narrative with current events in the American economy gives “Union Atlantic” unusual impact. This timely novel demonstrates not only how the financial crisis happened but why — by documenting the intersection of big, blunt historical forces with tiny, intricate, cumulatively powerful personal impulses. Businesses become too big to fail, Haslett suggests, because individuals fail one another, in a snowball effect.

Haslett’s first book, the 2002 story collection “You Are Not a Stranger Here,” was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Each story in that moody, introspective book explored a different way that tightly wound lives can come unspooled. Haslett wrote in a variety of detached, understated voices, each aching in its precise registry of the minute gradations of emotional pain. It’s remarkable how successfully “Union Atlantic” — so unlike the stories in structure and style, and so much broader in scope — continues the nuance of Haslett’s earlier characterizations. The actors in this extroverted drama are closeted (or not-so-closeted) introverts. The screen of their surface behavior hides their obsessions and hopes, as well as their shame — just as the balance sheet of a shady debt bundle can appear spruce and clear while concealing a thicket of machinations.

As the novel begins, Fanning has had a hillside near his childhood home in Massachusetts cleared in order to erect a sterile McMansion. His eccentric next-door neighbor, a history teacher named Charlotte Graves who was forced out of the local high school for excessive moralizing, despises Fanning and his giant house, but he assumes he can ignore her. Yet he soon learns that Charlotte isn’t so easy to sidestep. Idealist to the core, an articulate defender of the Constitution and civil rights, she’s also a kook who believes that her two massive hounds share her disillusionment with modern ways.

One of the dogs channels the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather, the other is a canine reincarnation of Malcolm X. Charlotte has lengthy arguments with both animals about the decay of the social compact that Fanning considers defunct. Crazy? Maybe. She recalls a character from Haslett’s “You Are Not a Stranger Here,” an institutionalized woman who converses with an opinionated ghost. But Charlotte is sharp enough to suspect that the town didn’t have the legal right to sell the land where Fanning built his “steroidal offense” — land that once belonged to her forefathers. She may be right, and she may be able to pursue her case. If she does, will she have the wits — and the tenacity — to defeat the forces of greed and selfishness arrayed against her?

Charlotte still tutors the occasional high school student. One of these is a quiet senior, Nate Fuller, whose father killed himself the previous fall, after being unemployed for two years. Like the protagonist in Haslett’s story “The Beginnings of Grief,” Nate has begun to feel sexual desire for men in the wake of his father’s death. Curious about the new place near Charlotte’s house, which he believes to be unoccupied, Nate breaks in. When Fanning, returning, finds him there, Nate feels a strong instant attraction. “Terrified at the thought of what kind of person he was for wanting this,” Nate can’t resist the call of “enacting the fantasy of self-forgetting” with this macho egotist. Charlotte has attempted to awaken Nate’s civic conscience, but after meeting Fanning the boy prefers to let it sleep, rationalizing that “losing his father permitted him this moral lapse. As if, in some grand ledger, his loss had earned him a pass or two.”

Many of the characters in “Union Atlantic” are more closely linked than is strictly probable. The high school kids Nate hangs out with include the son of Fanning’s boss, while nutty Charlotte happens to be the sister of the New York Fed chief. And yet these overly convenient connections reflect a larger truth that obtains between Main Street and Wall Street: compact or no compact, the fates of both streets are entwined. In “Union Atlantic,” swiftly and confidently, Haslett unwinds the ball of yarn that is the global financial crisis to reveal its core: a knot of ineluctable yearnings and individual needs.

Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.

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Books »A version of this article appeared in print on February 14, 2010, on page 9 of the Sunday Book Review.